Latest imported feed items on East Coast Liberal Elite2020-06-06T05:15:53ZAt the end of one of his most turbulent weeks in office, President Donald Trump was eager on Friday to boast of a better than expected jobs report to argue the country is poised for a booming recovery. Benjamin Lund was not moved. The 45-year-old Milwaukee man is a longtime Republican who was raised in a conservative family in the political battleground of Wisconsin.

]]>2020-06-06T05:11:16ZMomentum for what many hope is a sustained movement aimed at tackling racial injustice and police reforms promised to grow Saturday as more protesters filled streets around the world and mourners prepared to gather in the U.S. for a second memorial service for George Floyd, who died a dozen days ago at the hands of police in Minneapolis. Formal and impromptu memorials to Floyd over the last several days have stretched from Minneapolis to Paris, Rome and Johannesburg, South Africa. In North Carolina, where he was born, a public viewing and private service for family was planned Saturday.

]]>2020-06-06T05:03:45ZShigeru Yokota, a Japanese campaigner for the return of his daughter and more than a dozen others who were abducted to North Korea in the 1970s, has died. Megumi disappeared in 1977 on her way home from her a junior high school in Niigata on Japan’s northern coast when she was 13. A former Central Bank official, Yokota, and his wife kept looking for Megumi and found out 20 years later that she had been abducted to North Korea by its agents.

]]>2020-06-06T04:47:54ZJoe Biden has formally clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, setting him up for a bruising challenge to President Donald Trump that will play out against the unprecedented backdrop of a pandemic, economic collapse and civil unrest. “It was an honor to compete alongside one of the most talented groups of candidates the Democratic party has ever fielded,” Biden said in a statement Friday night, ”and I am proud to say that we are going into this general election a united party.” The former vice president has effectively been his party’s leader since his last challenger in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders, ended his campaign in April.

]]>2020-06-06T03:00:04ZNight Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week

As a pandemic that’s killed over 393,000 people rages on and demonstrations demanding racial justice continue across the globe, the international community on Friday marked World Environment Day with scientifically supported warnings about the importance of protecting nature for the future of humanity.

Climate campaigners, including members of the youth-led Fridays for Future movement, as well as other activists, scientists, policymakers, and global figures such as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres publicly called for more ambitious environmental action around the world.

The theme of this year’s World Environment Day (WED)—an annual event the U.N. has held since 1974 to raise awareness and generate political momentum around environmental issues—is biodiversity, or the variety and variability of life in a particular place or on the entire planet.

“With our increasing demands, humans have pushed nature beyond its limit,” explains an official WED 2020 website. “The emergence of Covid-19 has underscored the fact that, when we destroy biodiversity, we destroy the system that supports human life.”

“By upsetting the delicate balance of nature, we have created ideal conditions for pathogens—including coronaviruses—to spread,” the website says. “We are intimately interconnected with nature. If we don’t take care of nature, we can’t take care of ourselves.”

At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—Federal judge twice considered for Supreme Court said blacks and Latinos are more violence prone:

Where do these people come from? Why aren’t they begging for spare change on street corners instead of drawing federal salaries? Never mind, that’s rhetorical. We know where they come from.

Judge Edith Jones was appointed to the Fifth Circuit Court by none other than Ronald Reagan in 1985. And while most right-wing judges are smart enough to keep any racist views they may harbor to themselves, after 28 years on the bench, Jones apparently decided to let her freak flag fly. Fortunately, her alleged remarks at a February lecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law have sparked the filing of a compliant by a coalition of civil rights groups. The complaint says that her claims in the lecture, including the view that blacks and Latinos are more prone to violent behavior than other Americans, violated several of the canons of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges.

Jones’s remarks were not recorded. But five students and an attorney in attendance at her lecture on the death penalty signed affidavits attesting to what she said

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trumpster loons punk themselves over ghost buses full of antifa supersoldiers invading their hamlets. Tom Cotton exploits the NYT brain hack. Policing doesn’t have to be this way. We haven’t always had cops in this country. Certainly not like these, anyway.

]]>2020-06-06T02:51:16ZThe first of several Black Lives Matter protests across Australia on Saturday got underway against a backdrop of possible clashes between demonstrators and police in Sydney, after a court sided with police that the gathering posed too much risk for spreading the coronavirus. The first gathering in the southern city of Adelaide was held to honor George Floyd and to protest against the deaths of indigenous Australians in custody. Floyd, a black man, died in handcuffs while a Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee on his neck even after he pleaded for air and stopped moving.

]]>2020-06-06T02:25:20ZJoe Biden formally clinched the Democratic presidential nomination Friday, setting him up for a bruising challenge to President Donald Trump that will play out against the unprecedented backdrop of a pandemic, economic collapse and civil unrest. The former vice president has effectively been his party’s leader since his last challenger in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders, ended his campaign in April. Biden reached the threshold three days after the primaries because several states, overwhelmed by huge increases in mail ballots, took days to tabulate results.

]]>2020-06-06T02:25:07ZAn entitled white venture capitalist is now out of a space to lease for his business after viral video shows him practically accusing a group of Black entrepreneurs Tuesday in Minneapolis of trespassing for attempting to work out in a gym their office rental granted them use of. Tom Austin owns the company F2 Group and rents office space in the Mozaic East building in question, Business Insider reported. But he was no more entitled to the building’s shared gym space than other renters in the building.

Still, he felt the need to approach a group of Black men linked to the social media and marketing company Top Figure. “I’m Tom Austin. I’m a tenant in the building. Are you,” he can be seen on video asking the men. “We’re all tenants of this building,” one of the men answered. But that apparently didn’t satisfy Austin’s propensity to imitate building security, so he asked the men: “What office?”

At that point, one of the renters told Austin they didn’t have to answer his questions. A person narrating the recording described the situation as “racism.” Austin, who had earlier taken photos of the men using his cell phone, started calling a woman he referred to as Nicole—presumably Nicole Lavere, assistant property manager with the Ackerberg Group.

“I don’t know what you can do here, but there’s a whole bunch of people who don’t appear to be part of the [building],” Austin told her. He insisted Wednesday in an interview with the Star Tribune that he is not racist. He told the newspaper that the building recently sent an email to tenants that only leasers could use the gym and other building amenities. He said he thought the men may not all be tenants because he saw one of them using his key fob to let the others in and they became “aggressive” when he talked to them.

Austin told the Star Tribune he and the men continued to work out in the gym after their encounter. “By the end of the night, we were on talking terms,” he told the newspaper. “I said, ‘I’m sorry you thought I was being racist, but I was not. If you were a bunch of women, I would have done the same thing.’” That example is more applicable to an allegation of sexism than racism, but apparently Austin couldn’t be bothered to keep his “isms” straight in his non-apology.

The business owners posted their synopsis of what happened on the Top Figure Instagram page:

Normally we don’t speak out about encounters of racial profiling and age discrimination that we face day to day in our lives as young black entrepreneurs. Although today May 26th 2020 7:51pm we encountered a situation where a man entered the facility, a shared private gym that we utilize in our @wework @mozaic_east office located in uptown Minnesota. Granted we’ve been in this office space and have rented and grown our business for the past 1 year and half here. As we were working out this man approached and immediately asked us who we were and if “WE BELONG” in this building. Granted in order to enter the building you NEED a key card to enter EVERY part of the building which EACH of our team members individually have. We all pay rent here and this man demanded that we show him our key cards or he will call the cops on us. We are sick and tired of tolerating this type of behavior on a day to day basis and we feel that we had to bring light onto this situation.

The WeWork facility was quick to respond with a statement Wednesday, noting that Austin is not a “WeWork member” and that the encounter didn’t happen in one of the business’ spaces. The gym is shared between WeWork and another business. “We do not tolerate discrimination in any form,” the WeWork company said in its statement. “We have asked the building owner, and operator of the gym, where the recorded incident took place, to take immediate steps to investigate and address the conduct in the video.”

Ackerberg CEO Stuart Ackerberg told the Star Tribune he was already heartbroken about another racial incident in the city when he heard about the encounter at the Mozaic East building he owns. George Floyd, a Black man, was shown in a viral video pleading with Minnesota police that he couldn’t breathe as an officer knelt on his neck. He later died, according to his family’s attorney, Ben Crump. Floyd was suspected of forgery by the police involved in the incident, Crump said in a news release.

“My heart hurts,” Ackerberg told the Star Tribune. “This is not how we do business. […] I’m alarmed by what I saw.” He spoke to Austin Wednesday. “I shared with him that I did not think it was handled well and there are other ways to go about this,” Ackerberg said. “It’s unfortunate. Our goal is to create a safe and inviting experience for everybody.”

]]>2020-06-06T01:45:05ZThe Reopen America movement—made up of a conservative, mostly white, and frequently heavily armed set of protests—was a sad affair. In some cases the protests were dangerous affairs as armed white guys screamed in the faces of law enforcement and threatened to take over government buildings. While obviously small, these anti-government “control” theatrical events always seemed to come up against very restrained and sober law enforcement. This has not been true for the Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice in our country. This double standard seems to be pretty easy to diagnose. There’s a certain homogeneity to it.

A video has gone viral that is purporting to show alleged Proud Boys white supremacist types who are at the very least white, well armed, non-law enforcement types being gently told by actual law enforcement how to stay off to the side and out of the way so as to not end up feeling the physical brunt of our country’s justice.

A live broadcast video on June 1 that was originally posted on Facebook by someone named Joe Smothers has gone viral. The video takes place in Salem, Oregon and follows peaceful protests going on in the name of George Floyd. Later in the video, Smothers heads back to an area of businesses that seem to be patrolled by numerous white folks with guns. Smothers can be heard talking about chatter that antifa has claimed it will be striking affluent white areas. It is at this point of the video that we get to see how white citizens with guns—also known as “conservative activists”—are treated ever so slightly differently than unarmed citizens with more diverse backgrounds.

A law enforcement officer approaches a crew of assault rifle-snuggled white guys and soothingly explains that he and his team of law enforcement officials will be enforcing the citywide curfew and they want to be able to arrest people—but not these gun-toting white people. “My command wanted me to come talk to you to you guys and request that you guys keep yourselves inside, in your vehicles, somewhere where it’s not a violation so we don’t look like we are playing favorites, because that would be unhealthy.”

This is a different response than other protesters received.

A group of remaining protestors and police collided at the intersection of Winter and Center Street following a peaceful protest at about 11:15 p.m. pic.twitter.com/h3Upsg1tPF

The Salem Reporter asked Police Chief Jerry Moore about the seeming bias here between how law enforcement deals with armed white folks protecting shampoo and a more diverse, less armed group of peaceful protesters who are calling for justice. The paper also reports that the almost 80 people who descended on those businesses to protect them from looters could have come from anywhere, and no one knew exactly who they were. There were suspicions by some on social media that some of these men were white supremacists or Proud Boys.

Moore said the officer taped, who he didn’t identify, “had not been fully briefed about enforcement of the curfew before he spoke with the group.” He said the matter had been “discussed with the officer.”

“We are lawfully bound to weigh the severity of the crime against the level of our response,” Moore said. “Lawfully armed individuals violating a curfew does differ in severity from people throwing bricks and bottles.”

While offering up little to no evidence, law enforcement, from the top down, has pretended that there is a need for curfews and military-style control over citizens due to anarchistic elements who are willing to loot and riot. As most people have seen by now, curfews are only used by law enforcement to give those around them a general sense of the timing of when our police and National Guardsmen will begin rioting against their own citizens.

Like Jake Lyon and five of his coworkers in Colorado, who were ordered back to work at the tea shop where they were employed, but wanted to make sure that coming back was safe. Lyon told The New York Times about how they asked their boss to delay reopening and to meet with them to discuss how they could operate safely. For their concern, they were fired. Not just fired: their employer reported them to the state’s unemployment office to have their benefits revoked. That’s real life out here in America, real life that seems to be escaping the notice of too many congressional leaders who seem content to wait another two months—until the end of July—to take further action.

Some states—Oklahoma and Ohio in particular—are encouraging employers to report employees who have refused to return to work and in Oklahoma’s case, created a dedicated email address for businesses to do just that. Alabama and South Carolina are also telling people to choose: chance getting sick and dying at your job, or give up eating and having a home. Tennessee’s labor commissioner has made it official, declaring that the only people who can refuse to return to work and keep their benefits have to either be diagnosed with the virus, caring for a family member with it, or confined to quarantine because of exposure to it. You can’t refuse to go back to work, no matter how dangerous your job might be.

Robin Slater, a 65-year old line cook in a sports bar in Boise, Idaho, also talked to The New York Times about that. He has lung issues from 40 years as a smoker. He’s the only employee there who wears a mask, and his employer isn’t following the state or city guidelines for restaurants. The bar itself had established a limit of six people in a party but 14 people came in last Sunday, and were all seated together. He has to work. “Most of our servers and cooks are in their 20s and 30s,” Slater said. “They’re all like, ‘It doesn’t really matter.’ But I don’t want to go back to work and die.” It’s that or lose his unemployment.

And this is also the problem with the approach Democrats and Republicans alike took in responding to this crisis. What should have been happening from the beginning is sustained direct payments to everyone apart from unemployment benefits, and government subsidization of business payrolls. That would sustain workers and it would allow businesses to keep them employed and keep the businesses afloat—without putting anyone’s life in danger.

]]>2020-06-06T00:35:07ZOn June 1, 2020, a collection of peaceful protesters gathered on Benjamin Franklin Parkway in downtown Philadelphia. As curfew approached, the mostly young crowd began to be corralled by bike police officers. An escalation of events took place and 21-year-old Temple University engineering student named Evan Gorski was arrested. According to Philadelphia police, Gorski allegedly “assaulted a police officer by pushing him off a bike, causing him to break a hand.”

After spending almost two days in jail, the charges against Gorski were dismissed. It turns out that two videos of the very interaction that led to Gorski’s arrest are widely available on YouTube and Twitter. It also turns out that those videos contradict the police narrative of what happened on Monday before they arrested Gorski.

In the video, you can see Gorski on the bottom left of the screen. He has long hair in a ponytail and is wearing a football jersey. He is seemingly trying to quell the surging police forces, who have begun escalating the protest into a conflict. Gorski puts his hand over to grab at a protester who is being tugged and pulled by another police officer—possibly having a camera or something taken from him. It is at that point that one of the officers begins swinging a baton with full force. The officer—we will call him Lt. Worthless for the time being—then loses his baton as Gorski smartly grabs it away from him as he is being taken to the ground, and he throws the baton away from the officer. Lt. Worthless along with another officer then pin Gorski down with their knees.

As the video progresses, another police officer steps out in front of the men kneeling on Gorski to begin swinging his baton wildly at another protester, who apparently has become far too peaceful for the police to manage.

William Bender of The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the officer in the video—the short and overweight one who seems to only have a middling skill set that includes wildly swinging a baton at peaceful protesters—is a high-ranking officer. According to the report, his name is Staff Inspector Joseph Bologna, and he makes a base salary of $126,339 per year and who knows how much in overtime on top of that, to be this terrible at his job. Philadelphia police declined to comment on the case.

Gorski’s attorney, R. Emmett Madden, told reporters that Gorski was struck in the head by the baton-wielding police officer and required medical attention. He says that the videos of the incident shot by other protesters and journalists helped get his client out from under these trumped-up charges. District attorney spokesperson Larry Krasner told the Inquirer: “The video is concerning in more than one way. The District Attorney’s Office and District Attorney Krasner himself carefully reviewed the case presented by the police, other evidence, and then declined it.”

As with most of these incidents, law enforcement used an approaching curfew as an excuse to begin agitating and moving groups of protesters, threatening them, and then finally opening up and creating violent conflicts. What we are seeing across our country is a macro version of what many Black Americans have been experiencing for hundreds of years.

]]>2020-06-06T00:24:01ZAmid the anger, violence and grief evident in the massive protests shaking the country after the death of George Floyd, images of calm are beginning to emerge as the mood shifts to more peaceful calls for change.

]]>2020-06-06T00:03:44ZKenya faces a race against time to tackle the swarms as the end of the insects’ breeding season clashes with harvests.

]]>2020-06-06T00:00:15ZEco-organizations, some of which have struggled with their own lack of racial diversity and an inadequate focus on environmental justice, have stepped up with statements in support of justice for murdered African American George Floyd and for a transformation of America’s policing and other racist policies. Journalists at Inside Climate News have highlighted statements issued by several of them. This is encouraging. As always, however, the question is how much will these words be turned into continuing action once the protests inevitably wane and the hard work begins of making the transformation happen? After all, in 2015 under President Obama, the entirety of The Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing is sitting on a government shelf.

Some eco-advocacy groups already have a history of working for environmental justice, or, like the youth-led Sunrise Movement, have made it a crucial element of their credos from the get-go. Among these are the grassroots Communities of Change and the Bronx Climate Justice North, which includes on its website: “Without a focus on correcting injustice, work on climate change addresses only symptoms, and not root causes.”

Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization and co-chair of the national Climate Justice Alliance, told ICN’s reporters that she considers showing up to fight police brutality and racial violence an essential element of her climate crisis activism. Since “big green” eco-organizations have used the climate justice narrative without necessarily making it a priority of their agendas, Yeampierre says they should take direction from Black Lives Matter organizers in this matter.

The Rev. Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest who is executive director of GreenFaith, a global religious-based climate action network based in Highland Park, New Jersey posted on his blog: “For too long, the environmental movement has not been concerned enough about the destruction that climate change wreaks on Black and Brown communities around the world. For too long, we haven’t been concerned enough about Black and Brown people who can’t breathe because they are carrying the weight of climate change and White supremacy.”

Patrick Houston, climate and inequality campaigns organizer for New York Communities for Change, said he believes the broader climate movement is “becoming much more open to listening and understanding the struggles of the black community” by connecting “overt racism and violence” with “overlooked racism” stemming from proximity to power plants and other fossil fuel infrastructure.

Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the Boston-based Environmental Voter Project, said “every fight we enter is also a choice about whom to protect—will we protect the privileged or the oppressed, the heard or the unheard, those who feel the brunt of environmental impacts or those who don’t?”

At the widely read California Water Blog published by the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, all discussions of water this week have been suspended in solidarity with the protests. On Monday, a blog post entitled “Black Lives Matter” included this:

Institutional racism is urgent and real, and should divert us from topics of California water at this time. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others are horrific, and the effects of a pandemic are disproportionately affecting communities of color. At the Center for Watershed Sciences, we acknowledge that while we strive for equity and inclusion in our science in line with our Principles of Community, we have a long way to go to address racism and unconscious bias.

We admire all who have flooded our social media and news this week with demonstrations of the great power of diversity in our nation and our scientific fields. We support and encourage everyone to have the hard conversations and do the hard work to learn more about how to better support all people in our communities. It is moments like this that remind us that bearing witness to racism and injustice is critical and must be a core part of our mission.

When those Minneapolis police officers decided last month that it was okay to put a knee on George Floyd’s neck and ignore his pleas that he couldn’t breathe, they didn’t do anything that other cops haven’t done for years. But doing it on camera has sparked a broader, bigger resistance to this behavior and to the unwillingness of so many of our leaders to do something to stop it.

It’s easy to say—as the hundreds of thousands of protesters of all colors stand against these atrocities and the system that encourages them to keep happening—that this time things will be different, this time we really will change this at its roots. Possibly. Hopefully. But that will require relentlessness. Allies of Black Lives Matter in this fight—whether the environment or some other matter is their usual political work—must be willing to back up their words and protests now with relentless support over the long haul. Black Americans don’t have the option of giving up the fight.

]]>2020-06-05T23:43:27ZAttorney General William Barr says law enforcement officers were already moving to push back protesters from a park in front of the White House when he arrived there Monday evening, and he says he did not give a command to disperse the crowd, though he supported the decision. Barr’s comments in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday were his most detailed explanation yet of what unfolded outside the White House earlier this week. Shortly after officers aggressively pushed back demonstrators, President Donald Trump — accompanied by Barr, Pentagon leaders and other top advisers — walked through Lafayette Park to pose for a photo at a nearby church that had been damaged during the protests.

]]>2020-06-05T23:32:04ZThe Late Nighters Weigh In

“My favorite writer is Abraham Lincoln. And he once told a country that had almost destroyed itself over race to strive to finish the work we are in…to bind up the nation’s wounds. Yet tragically here we are 155 years later, still struggling to heal that terrible wound. It is taking too goddamn long.”—Conan O’Brien

Continued…

Late Nighters continued

“As a society, we spend more on the systems that punish and devalue black lives than we do on the things that reaffirm and empower black lives and allow people to live lives of safety, decency, and health. We need laws restricting the use of force, demilitarizing police, and investing in nonviolent alternatives to the police. We know these policies can work, we just need leaders who will talk about them and who will talk about the ways we can begin to dismantle the interlocking systems of racism and injustice that perpetuate police violence.”—Seth Meyers

“Take it upon yourself to be a leader and set an example of the kind of country you want to live in. That might mean going down to a protest or making a donation, or having a tense conversation about race. You’re not going to get that from the White House. So we need to step up and provide it ourselves. Because America is officially BYOP: bring your own president.”—Stephen Colbert

“We need people at the top to be the most accountable, because they are the ones who are basically setting the tone and the tenor for everything that we do as a society. It’s the same way we tell parents to set an example for their kids, captains and coaches to set an example for their players, and teachers to set an example for their students. The reason we do that is because we understand in society that if you lead by example, there’s a good chance that people will follow that example that you have set. And so if the example law enforcement is setting is that they do not adhere to the laws, then why should the citizens of that society adhere to the laws when, in fact, the law enforcers themselves don’t?”—Trevor Noah

When you finally reach the front of the line at Popeye’s and they’re out of the spicy chicken.
—The Daily Show

“[The White House] continues to insist [Trump’s church stunt] was not a photo op. But let’s review the facts here: he walked to the church, he stood in front of the church, never went in the church, never spoke to anyone from the church, didn’t examine the damage to the church, held up a Bible upside down, didn’t read from the Bible, didn’t give a speech, posed for photos, and left. I dunno, that sounds like a pretty textbook definition of a photo-op to me. he treated it like taking your kid to see Santa at the mall. ‘You got the picture? Okay, let’s get the hell outta here.’”—JimmyKimmel

And now, our feature presentation…

–

Cheers and Jeers for Friday, June 5, 2020

Note: Full moon tonight. Get yer butt in the back yard, look up, think of Neil Armstrong, and give it a wink. It’s the law.

–

By the Numbers:

10 days!!!

Days ’til Lobster Day: 10

Support and opposition, respectively, of the Black Lives Matter movement on August 12, 2017 (the Charlottesville “very fine people” riots), according to the Civiqs tracking poll: 37%, 41%

Support and opposition, respectively, to the Black Lives Matter movement today: 49%, 24%

Jobless claims since the national lockdowns: 42 million

Portion of dentist offices that have reopened across the U.S. for routine care: 2/3

Value of the MaxMara handbag that senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump used to carry the Bible that her dad held up during his botched church photo-op stunt: $1,540

Betting markets: Biden takes “…his biggest lead over Trump to date in Smarkets, a U.K.-based online gambling platform, as well as Predict It, an online betting platform established by researchers in New Zealand. As recently as last week, Trump was favored to win on both platforms.”

And even obnoxious beltway chatterbox Chris Cillizza admits that “Biden, as of right now, has a WHOLE lot of different paths to 270 electoral votes, while Trump has a dwindling number.” If it’s up to me, my preferred path is the one marked Rout 45.

JEERS to the un-learning curve. States were warned not to re-open too soon. But many of them, especially in red states, were all like, “It’s all good, so shut up you so-called ‘health people’ with your beakers and your lab coats and your clipboards. We’ll do what we want.” Yeah. Let’s see how that’s workin’ out:

» On Wednesday, Florida saw its largest number of new cases of the coronavirus since mid-April as the state works to reopen its economy.

» Phase 3 of the plan to reopen Texas comes as the number of new cases of COVID-19 continues to rise.

» In Arkansas on Tuesday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said there were 375 new positive coronavirus tests, the highest single-day number of new community cases.

» Several southern U.S. states reported sharp increases in COVID-19 infections, with Alabama, South Carolina and Virginia all seeing new cases rise 35% or more in the week ended May 31 compared with the prior week, according to a Reuters analysis.

Overall, the death toll stands at 110,000. But this weekend the president will be tackling the situation by—[checks notes]—beating Covid-19 molecules with a variety of golf clubs at one of his resorts. I swear to god, you could park a B-52 on that man’s shoulders.

CHEERS to D-Day. The largest amphibious landing in history, during which—gasp!—American ANTIFA forces invaded Europe to restore representative democracy, happened 76 years ago tomorrow. Six years ago, back when we had a Commander-in-Chief with more than two brain cells to rub together, President Obama flew over to France and delivered a moving tribute to the rapidly-dwindling number of veterans who waded ashore on that horrific yet awe-inspiring day:

Lengthy applause rang out as the U.S. President said he was humbled by the presence of some of those veterans at the ceremony.

“Here, we don’t just commemorate victory, as proud of that victory as we are; we don’t just honor sacrifice, as grateful as the world is; we come to remember why America and our allies gave so much for the survival of liberty at this moment of maximum peril,” Obama said. Their story should remain “seared into the memory of a future world,” he said, describing Omaha as “democracy’s beachhead.”

President Obama and WWII veteran Kenneth (“Rock”) Merritt talk on Marine One after departing the 70th French-American Commemoration D-Day Ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, France, June 6, 2014.

He said, “It was here, on these shores, that the tide was turned in that common struggle for freedom. What more powerful manifestation of America’s commitment to human freedom than the sight of wave after wave of young men boarding those boats to liberate people they’d never met?”

The Atlantic has a fascinating interactive feature that shows you various scenes from D-Day and, with a click of your mouse or a touch of your finger, what they look like now. It’s pretty mind-blowing. True fact: to this day, Dick Cheney is still a little confused as to why we went through all the trouble—after all, the intelligence was accurate, the threat was real, and there wasn’t any oil there. Crazy.

JEERS to eye-rolling moments in history. 90 years ago this week, in 1930, The New York Times took a huge step forward in the civil rights movement. I do believe audible gasps were heard across Manhattan when the editors agreed to start capitalizing the ‘N’ in”Negro.” So to refresh our collective memory:

negro = old, unacceptable usage.

Negro = new, acceptable usage.

And we all lived happily ever after.

CHEERS to checking one promise off your list. Congratulations, President Trump. You finally finished building a wall. Around your own ample ass,you lily-livered coward:

He really should top it off with a dome. I hear Antifa is setting up rotten-egg catapults in Alexandria. (Oops, I’ve said too much.)

CHEERS to home vegetation. A quick spin around the TV schedule for the weekend, starting with Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, who will try to out-primal-scream each other on MSNBC. PBS NewsHour is airing a special at 9ET called Race Matters: America in Crisis. Then at 10 on HBO’s Real Time, Bill Maher social distances with “Killer Mike” Render, intelligence expert Frank Figliuzzi, former RNC chair Michael Steele and Georgetown University professor Rosa Brooks, while Lady Gaga headlines The Graham Norton Show at 11 on BBC America.

For the 45th year in a row, Brody, Quint and Hooper are gonna need a bigger boat.

New home video releases include the 45th anniversary(!!!) release of Jaws and a bunch of lesser-known but varied releases. Sports encores, from the 2018 Memorial golf tournament to the 2006 French Open classic between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal dominate the networks during the afternoon, and there’s a live IndyCar event (the Genesys 300) tomorrow at 8 on NBC. On 60 Minutes: updates on the Covid-19 pandemic, and a report on the polluted Tijuana River. If you’re jonesin’ for a Grease sing-along, you got it Sunday at 8:30 on CBS. And John Oliver will have a thing or two to say about stuff Sunday night at 11 on HBO’s Last Week Tonight.

Face the Nation: Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner; Uberfuhrer of the American Gestapo Bill Barr; Condi Rice, the national security adviser who blew off the PDB titled “Bin Laden determined to Strike in America.”

CNN’s State of the Union: Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA); Colin Powell; Jake tapper catches Ben Carson up on what happened during his six-week nap.

CHEERS to whacko wedding bells. Sanctity-of-marriage crusader Rush Limbaugh (“If you want a successful marriage, let your husband do what he wants to do”) is getting sanctifitiously married tomorrow for the fourth time—to a woman 26 years younger. They would’ve tied the knot sooner, but they had to work out a few details. She finally agreed to a pre-nup. He finally agreed that she could keep her blindfold on.

–

And just one more…

CHEERS to blowing this popsicle stand. Whenever the shit gets too deep here on the bluish-brown marble, which is like every moment of every day now, I call NASA to see if Mike Pence has colonized the moon yet. Sorry to say the answer is no (but they’re working on it!) so we’ll just have to spend our days and nights gazing yonward and dreaming. Here’s a peek at this month’s highlights, including the year’s first lunar and solar eclipses and a visit from comet Lemmon, courtesy of Secrets of the Universe:

Also: on the 17th you might get a clear glimpse of a Romulan vessel in that miraculous split second between the time they de-cloak to vaporize your neighbor’s tool shed and then re-cloak. Have that smart-cam ready and prepare to go viral.

Have a great weekend. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?

Sen. Cotton had been tweeting out and pushing his fact free and fascist forward anti-Democracy opinions for a week before the opinion piece appeared in the pages of the Times. Staff at the times were furious, and the editorial staff even published an explanation on Thursday, detailing how truly awful the decision by Bennet was, how it did not meet the standards set by the Times, and how Bennett himself admitted to not having even read the fascistic rant before running it to print. Well, on Friday, even more information came out about how this kitty-litter liner of an op-ed came into existence. And that news has added to calls for Bennet to resign or be fired from his position.

On Thursday, New York Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy released the statement that “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

Sources inside of a town hall where the New York Times leadership is taking turns apologizing to their employees for this lapse in integrity report that Sen. Tom Cotton didn’t write up some op-ed that then the Times published. No, it was Cotton’s weeks of racist tweets and fascist tweets that moved James Bennet to ask for a print version of totalitarianism.

From New York Times town hall: op-ed team pitched the piece TO Tom Cotton. Not the other way around.

And then Bennet didn’t even read the op-ed before publishing it? That’s the fucking job he has!!!! He should be fired!!! Here’s some clarity, so we can “embrace debate,” a term Bennet enjoys obfuscating with.

Sen. Cotton’s office sez: “We originally approached the Times about possibly writing on a separate, but related topic. They countered with a piece on the Insurrection Act, which Senator Cotton had talked about on Monday during a television interview.”

]]>2020-06-05T22:30:08ZThe nation is in crisis and the vast majority of Americans say Donald Trump is failing miserably to provide the necessary leadership, according to new polling by ABC News/Ipsos.

The outlets only released three questions—all related to either the coronavirus or the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Trump didn’t fare well on either.

Fully 66% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s response to the killing of Floyd, with just 32% approving.

Respondents also indicated they view the problem of police brutality against people of color as systemic, with 74% saying Floyd’s killing was a “sign of broader problems in the treatment of African Americans by police” and 26% calling it an isolated incident.

Trump didn’t do much better on his pandemic response, with 60% of respondents disapproving of his handling of coronavirus. The outlets have been polling the question since mid-March, when Trump started at 54% disapproval/43% approval, and Trump’s numbers have only gotten worse, with 60% disapproval marking a low point.

]]>2020-06-05T21:38:55ZPresident Donald Trump on Friday declared it was “a great day” for George Floyd as he discussed a strong jobs report for the country and efforts to bring about racial equality. Joe Biden, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, said Trump’s comments about Floyd were “despicable.” Trump’s comments about Floyd came as he shifted from discussing a drop in the unemployment rate to say everyone deserved “equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement, regardless of race, color, gender or creed.”

]]>2020-06-05T21:30:18ZDuring a virtual town hall Thursday, former vice president Joe Biden estimated that some 10% to 15% of Americans are “not very good people,” adding that the vast majority were “decent” folks the president should work to unite.

Irrelevant comparisons were quickly made to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment about Donald Trump supporters in 2016 and even GOP nominee Mitt Romney saying in 2012 that 47% of Americans weren’t paying taxes and depended on the federal government. Really?

Here’s the only comparison that matters: Biden didn’t call a bunch of torch-wielding murderous neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.” That distinction belongs to Trump, who normalized an aggressive and ultimately deadly rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 by claiming many of those protesters had a legitimate and peaceful cause. “You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest,” Trump said, elaborating on his assertion that some “very fine people” took part in the events where attendees chanted the Nazi slogan “blood and soil.”

Biden was originally asked at the town hall about how he would lead people differently than Trump “if it’s true that you can’t truly lead people if you don’t love people.” Here was Biden’s fuller response, according to USA Today:

“I love people,” Biden replied. He accused President Donald Trump of dividing the country with his words and said that when a leader does that “you’re going to get the worst of us to come out,”.

“It’s about the attitude of the country – is this really as good as we think we can be as a nation?” Biden said. “I don’t think the vast majority of people think that. There are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the people out there that are just not very good people, but that’s not who we are.”

“The vast majority of the people are decent, and we have to appeal to that and we have to unite people – bring them together,” Biden added.

Sorry, folks, but if you’ve got a problem with that comment, maybe it’s more about taking a look in the mirror than what Biden said.